Matiyaburj

Mechanics. Mechanize. Mechanism. Mechatronics. I am. My finger. I am my finger. To myself. For them, I cannot be. A lean, crumpled, hair-laden skin, nail-headed, generating motion at will. But I, my finger, isn’t what it ever seems. I am the millions and the millionth cell, and above, the bodybone mechanism—the system of mutually adapted parts, bound, veiled under the fragile pink.

I am a mechanism. Running on the knowledge of blood of which they deny the knowhow. So they shiver and shake when the fuel oozes out, and gape, and wipe, as if someone has put the blood from the outside, as if it should be anywhere but there. Like the flesh isn’t there. The blood, the city’s underground drainage. It’s so vital that it’s scary. As they clean me and hide me– something of me, as vital. The underbelly draped, trapped to show there isn’t any or, maybe, not to show there is, and yet draped, because it is. The drape cannot deny its existence. Absence feeds on presence. Gets fattened.
Like I am: present with my finger’s mechanism. Withering with Marx.

I am my greatness. My unprovable greatness. As great as it may be. The ocean’s oceanic mountain. No one has to climb it to prove it, toil to freeze the sweat. It is simply floating at the summit of the sea-level. On a glorious morning, sunlit, fluttering the moist hairs inside the seawind of the blue blue vastness. It’s me under. Me. I have no ascent.

Yet, could he ever descend so easily, drilling the deep, prove his footprints on the barren, desolate toes of the mountain’s unfathomable base, where I sink, stone-laden, never to float up again. My historic feat! Diving below myself.  Through textures of a low-life, hollow crevices—fumbling along sleazy, run-down bars, salivating over left over dignity like dog brothers stalking greasy dustbins—into the sandvalleys of a billion nothingness as I de-scale the bottom to reach the peak never to return, to tell the flat world swaying in ignorant harmony of the mad waves.

Like a second, split, but a second nonetheless, squeezed between the transition clock of a pair of empty and loaded cluster seconds. Seconds, time-full and drank, and filled again to be drunk again.

I am the uneven, the protruding edge of a finite second, broken, tiny, clinging to the ground on the barely-there and unacknowledged bridge between two body-seconds. An anomaly in useless physics, the extra quarter of a full-bodied second, however, wherever, yet present.

It is, I am, the hollow silence, the pause between two gulps of water being drunk, the intermittent breath where no drop is consumed. Yet it is this presence that makes the drink enjoy itself. 

Food is not like us, humans. The first bite or scoop or sip does reveal the palate’s entire DNA. After that, the food’s invasion into your senses repeats itself– bite-by-bite or scoop-by-scoop or sip-by-sip and your happy tongue, programmed after the first taste, rejoices in advance on what good thing will fall into its lap. And it does. The tongue keeps savouring the unbelievable sameness and then, suddenly, it cannot eat anymore. So sad.

But we humans are the unmaking of all this. The person in question remains a person in question; his first impression never-lasting; his last impression his first impression.

Incidentally, when I, the famished, first nibbled an exotic assortment from an Oriental wok (pan), with my left hands holding an alloy steel knife, my ears tuning into overhead neo-Western music (Dido and all) and my right hand clanking the clattering white bone china cutlery with a fork, this subtle revelation had not yet dawned, even though it was high noon. All this came later; much after the soul had been satiated with a hodgepodge of fragile South Asian delights. Even personalities could change, by the way.

The restaurant in question was four-months-into-business Purple Rice, boxed with international flair in Sector-35, and its 23-year-old London-returned owner, Vipul Dua, assorting all sorts of exoticas for learned gastronomy and revenues.

I debuted here with Purple Treasure Soup, said to be the creation of the chef (Bhasker, scooped from Taj Delhi, now wearing a purple bandana) with eight types of exotic vegetables. Swooshed in, the crunchy-munchy pale liquid did do some good.

I followed up with lamb, with Paper Thin Lamb, with soft shredded meat stir fried with three types of bell-peppers and served, smoking; the itsy-bitsy creamy white bits trapped amid shreds of greenish foliage. Full in taste, the chewed lamb melted on contact and the taste-buds exhumed a lingering acknowledgment.

But barging into the lamb were mouthfuls of another crunchy-munchy—the very red and very brown Chicken Lettuce Wrap (boneless chicken breasts wrapped in lettuce leaves and tossed with some Thai sauce). The pieces would gently explode in the mouth’s gentle squeeze and fill the hot, dry tongue with instant fantasies.

The Zumbo prawns, as it turned out on eating were, prawn-like. They had a make-do name– Hot Chilli Prawns—and a nationality too—Indonesian. Really meaty, when guided, glided out of the stick and plucked golden brown.

On the black-brown round table swam in the promised Standing Pomfret, whole-fried with Malasian know-how and Xo sauce. Like fish eating fish, the sea/river fish, smeared with thick and tangy gravy, was dismembered, sideways, and eaten with my fumbling brown-wood chopsticks and eaten with the driest and the lightest chicken noodles of my recent memories.

Dessert has dates and I had honeyed Date Pancakes, the Chinese flour wrap popping out a chocolaty paste that the nice ice cream flowed into and made the mouth hot, cold, sweet and someway indescribable, the dripping honey apart.

All over.

The mouth is now buzzing with sting bees of smell. I swallow the saliva and silently, the jasmine tea arrives in a white porcelain kava, with remnants of some floating leaves. Sugarless, tasteless and also aroma-less, the warm brown water feels grudgingly good on my burning taste buds, like jasmine tea gliding over white porcelain.